A Love Letter To You

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Dear Bella,

We just celebrated a birthday, which got me thinking about beginnings. In the beginning we were two enthusiastic entrepreneurs with a passion for beauty products and a desire to make great things using safe all natural ingredients. Flash forward some years and we are still enthusiastic with a penchant for making great products using only the very best and absolutely safest ingredients. What’s different is what has happened in between.

Being an entrepreneur is not glamorous. It is not sexy or flawless or fun. You must know that if you want to know the truth. It’s about waking up at 3am to take phone calls from producers in Tunisia or arrange Skype meetings on your coveted Sunday afternoon or getting to bed at midnight to get back up five hours later. It’s about knowing how to deal with egos and often having to put your own on the back burner in the process. Sometimes you do things like leave your lovely home and family to work events in other cities or far away countries for retail partners or to meet potential new retailers at the expense of your own business without so much as a minute to fix your makeup or have a proper lunch. (The beauty business isn’t as pretty as some people try to make it look. Most times we have crazy hair and mismatched socks because we have no time to search for matches. Show up and get up.) Often you are like a school principal trying to balance a staff, making tough decisions, hiring, firing, avoiding conflict while trying to score a perfect A for the team. (Note: The perfect A is not real when you’re an entrepreneur. Let it go and aim to do better than you did yesterday.) There are lonely days and discouraging reviews, difficult customers, snobby business associates, insecure competition that try to squash you, haters, gossips and envious people that target you for unknown reasons. There are delayed ingredients, droughts that ruin your supply of helichrysum for the year, custom issues, packaging snafus, broken bottles, bad weather, a polar vortex or two, lost shipments, website problems and all the while there is…your life. You know, the one in which you have a family, friends, children, a house to run, a sick parent to care for and if you’re lucky they all support you, but you still feel so guilty that your work is so consuming you can’t always be at every event and you juggle your home life with your work life. Juggle, juggle, juggle. It’s never going to be perfect and you must be okay with that. You are an entrepreneur and with that fact you need to be like a Ford truck, tough and durable. Doesn’t that sound fabulous? Well, it is! It is because all of that stuff should be the daily challenge that motivates you to keep going and push through to the good stuff.

What is the good stuff you wonder? You. You are the good stuff. Our customer. The one that cheers for us. The one that has been with us from the beginning or has discovered us through social media or a blog post. The customer that has written to us or asked for our help. When you spend your money on our products and tell your friends about the new eye serum that has changed your life, that is, GOOD STUFF! Your support, your enthusiasm for new products, your honest words (we heard you when you said you hated our makeup compact packaging and you’re the reason we’re changing it) and your love for beauty is all, the real good stuff. When we think of a new product, we think of you. When we think of sourcing a new ingredient and we have the option to buy inexpensive product that can save us lots of money, we think of you and how you deserve better than that. When manufacturers approach us and tell us they can make our products faster and reduce our costs, we think of you and how we don’t want to cut our quality to make more products faster compromising what you expect from us. When we think of what to do next to make La Bella Figura better, we think of you and how to make your beauty experience the best ever. This is why we do what we do, going through the challenges that are tough and why we have grown into much more than we were when we started. Because of you. We always think of you.

There are lots of changes coming to La Bella Figura starting in just a few weeks. A while ago Karen and I sat down for lunch and we were going through timelines and a calendar feeling exhausted with all there was to do when our doorbell rang and the UPS guy delivered something that had us in tears when we opened our delivery. You’ll see it soon. We hugged one another because we couldn’t believe how we’ve grown into our shoes and that we’ve come such a long way with our goals and dreams for our business. We have been so excited to share with you and we can’t wait for you to see all that we’ve been working on, for you. We hope you’re patient with us as we transition into these new things. We’ve chosen to be sustainable while going through our transformation so it’ll be a few months before it’s all complete, but the first stage is coming on April 3. Our makeup collection is being repackaged in glass containers because with its amazing success we felt awful investing in more plastic packaging and decided it wasn’t necessary. Not one bit. (Recycle those babies please.) We have new products coming to the collection starting with Elysian Fields Hair and Body Hydro-Essence, a light vitamin rich and nourishing skin and hair booster/perfume that smells like the world in which heroes go to spend the rest of their days, hence the awesome name. We have two truly incredible cream moisturizers that we’ve been working on for a year and a half because we wanted them to feel like silk on your skin and to include ingredients that are top notch in skincare which took us forever to source. We’re confident you’re going to be pleased with our Crema Supernova and Crema Maestro when they launch later this summer! It’s been a pleasure working to get the good stuff for you. Thank you for making this all come true for La Bella Figura. We cherish you, our wonderful customer in every part of the world loving and sharing our beauty. It means so much and it is what's led to the surprise we have in store when we relaunch in just a few weeks. Our little special touch to honor you, just for you. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

With love,

Victoria and Karen and La Bella Figura

 

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3 Comments

  • What a beautiful, thoughtful, personalized letter. I love your posts on Instagram, and will be trying your beautiful products, Thank you.

    E.V. on
  • I really loved reading this! Most times brands pretend everything is perfect. I like that you talk about long hours and shipping problems and all the hard work it must take for businesses like yours to be really good at what you do. That’s why I buy directly from you because you’re service is the best and over the years your advice and samples have kept my skin on track. I’m excited for all the new things going on and can’t wait to see the surprise. Much love to LBF!

    Viviana on
  • Will be impatiently waiting for the launch-sooooo excited :) Thank you for staying true to the ideals we shop for…why we keep coming back

    RW on

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